Obama's right: Business needs government investment

Getty ImagesPresident Obama and Mitt Romney are pictured in these file photos.

President Obama is right when he says small businesses have been built because of government investments, not solely by the hard work of the business owner. The Romney campaign has taken his comment — "If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen." — out of context.

Consider the investment made by the government in the 1980s to create the internet. Since then, major companies including Facebook, Google, Amazon and many others were launched by entrepreneurs, who have created thousands of jobs and made billions of dollars. But these businesses required the internet. So, who built these businesses? Mark Zuckerberg did not build the internet, and he never could have built Facebook without it.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says the government shouldn’t have any role in job creation. His small-government philosophy will drastically cut spending on infrastructure, research and development and cost many workers their jobs.

Romney is the candidate who doesn’t understand how the economy really works, because he refuses to acknowledge the important role that the government has always played in nurturing the private sector.